Les Fleurs du mal, (
French: “The Flowers of Evil”) collection of poems published in 1857 by Charles Baudelaire. A second edition, published in 1861, was greatly enlarged and enhanced but omitted six poems that had been banned. (These were first republished in 1866 in Belgium in the collection Les Épaves, but they remained banned in France until 1949.) The otherwise definitive edition of Les Fleurs du mal was published posthumously in 1868. Contemporary scholars consider the work to be the fullest expression of French Romanticpoetry.

Les Fleurs du mal is composed of six sections, each with a theme—a structure that was new to French poetry. The sections are “Spleen et idéal,” “Tableaux parisiens,” “Le Vin,” “Fleurs du mal,” “Révolte,” and “La Mort.” Shifting in style from the rhetorical to the impressionistic, from the abstract to the intensely physical, Baudelaire balances banality and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the eternal interdependence of opposites.

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April 9, 1821 Paris, France August 31, 1867 Paris French poet, translator, and literary and art critic whose reputation rests primarily on Les Fleurs du mal (1857; The Flowers of Evil), which was perhaps the most important and influential poetry collection published in Europe in the 19th century....

April 9, 1821 Paris, France August 31, 1867 Paris French poet, translator, and literary and art critic whose reputation rests primarily on Les Fleurs du mal (1857; The Flowers of Evil), which was perhaps the most important and influential poetry collection published in Europe in the 19th century....

attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm,...